Amphibious Subjects

Front matter

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Amphibious Subjects

Part Three. Becoming And Unbecoming Amphibious Subjects In Hetero/homo Colonial Vortices

5. Palimpsestic Projects: Heterocolonial Missions in Post-Independent Ghana (1965-1975)

6. Queer Liberal Expeditions: The BBC’s The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay? and the Paradoxes of Homocolonialism

Conclusion: Queering Queer Africa?

Notes Bibliography Index

171 183 195

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

What a joy to finally arrive at the horizon that is this book. Of course, horizons are usually animated by mirages. A material product of my mind and the other penetrating minds that embarked on this journey with me, this book may be a mirage. But I know, too, that mirages can be miracles, that they can be real. This book is, therefore, one such miracle that materialized with the support of magnificent people who are, indubitably, lampposts of brilliance. Here are people who illuminated the jagged and dark terrains I strut as a fledgling and struggling ethnographer, intellectual, and activist, Black and queer.

My sincerest appreciation goes to the community of sasso I encountered in Jamestown. You embraced me into your beautiful worlds, which both transformed and made me rethink what it means to have a self, inhabit a body, that is condemned by society, yet hopes for a future amidst precarity. You constitute my newfound family, without whom this project would have been impossible. And to the late Hillary Afful I extend my sincerest gratitude. Hillary, wherever you are, I wish you “sound sleep? You held my hand from the start of this research. You opened that vista into a new universe for me. You were an unflinching knowledge bearer whose intellectual habits and contributions are dearly missed. Your fun-loving stature, jocular habits, “divaness,’ and love for all that is good, continue to emblazon my mind. I also want to thank Nelson Samuel Azumah for your reliable assistance to me in the field. Fieldwork is sometimes about building, but sometimes about rupturing, relationships. I’m quite sorry to have lost you as a friend. But, I am aware that the universe, in its own way, may once again bring us together. Time, as they say, heals, and hopefully, this fracture experiences that healing power. Iam also thankful to the organization where I conducted ethnographic research, Bring

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Us Rights and Justice (BURJ). Many thanks to the director of the organization for bringing me in, and making me one of your own. You created an enabling environment for me to thrive as an activist-scholar.

To my adviser Susan Wadley, whose intellectual rigor and fortitude, and love and affection for this work, I couldnt have done without. Sue, I offer you a big medaase—thank you—for being you, and for being there for me, just when I was near giving up. You pulled me out of despair. You told me I could do it, and that nothing, whatsoever, should stop me from accomplishing what I have tasked myself to do. I listened and delightedly digested your advisement. While the work was painstaking, your presence was exactly the antidote and cushion I needed when I was wedged between a rock and a hard place. Besides being my adviser, you also blessed me with the warmth of your home. Your husband, Rick Olanoff, offered me his listening ears and provocative advice when I felt I was going nowhere, and I extend my gratitude to him for undertaking the journey beyond this book with me. I am also thankful to my committee members for believing in me: Ann Gold, Christopher DeCorse, and Vincent Lloyd. Their love for this work, and their ability to foresee that I could do this ethnography in a perilous landscape of homonegativity were instrumental. I am thankful to Ann for allowing me to nourish my writerly self in the seminar Writing Religions and Cultures: Ethnographic Practice.

How to say thank you to Vincent Lloyd? Vincent, you have nourished my curiosity from the moment you stepped foot in Syracuse. The aura of your intellect is infectious. I honestly don’t know how much Td have conceptually framed this work without your erudite and expansive understanding of the very frameworks that inform it. You, indeed, encouraged me to love Africa and its place in the African diaspora and vice versa, and exposed me to works that were trending in the field that you thought were germane for this project. I very much look forward to fortifying our relationship, especially as I pass this milestone, and to seeking your advice when necessary. I also extend my appreciation to Rudi Gaudio for being there just when I needed him. I appreciate your friendship both as an intellectual and as a mentor. I look forward to being more responsive and communicative with you. Please, kindly pardon my unwarranted absences. I am also grateful for the numerous fellowships without which the groundwork for this book would not have been possible. A Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork grant, a Claudia DeLys Fieldwork Grant, and multiple grants from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University allowed me to lay the foundations for what this project has become.

I also extend my gratitude to the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. The Woodson has played an unquantifiable role in the making of this book—especially Deborah McDowell, who not only believed in me but has been generously present from the moment this book was conceived to when it was completed. As a Woodson Fellow,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

I had the opportunity to workshop chapters from the book in the company of LaTasha Levy, Nicole Burrowes, Ava Purkiss, Taneisha Means, and Tammy Owens, who, as co-fellows, helped to make this project bloom. What a space to discover hope and community, given how lonesome book writing can be. My sincerest appreciation to Jim Igoe and his family. Jim was not only a mentor but also a friend and advocate. To my colleagues and co-conspirators, Njelle Hamilton, Robert Vinson, and our office administrator Debbie Best, I extend my heartfelt gratitude.

Joining the faculty at the Woodson after my fellowship couldn't be more divine.

I also want to thank Jeffrey McCune and Marlon Bailey for recognizing the significance of this work by affording this book a home in the series New Sexual Worlds at the University of California Press. As series editors, they provided the assurance needed to get this book in shape. I am thankful to them and the various reviewers, anonymous and known, who read the manuscript and offered such vibrant feedback and suggestions. Xavier Livermon, Lyndon Gill, T. J. Tallie, Jesse Weaver Shipley, Patricia McFadden, Shanti Parikh, and China Scherz, as well as the many beautiful and gorgeous people who shared the wisdom that lit up the desire paths that led to the completion of the book by being unquantifiably generous. Thanks to Naomi Schneider and Summer Farah at the University of California Press for your presence and attention to detail, and making this process in the era of COVID-19 less daunting. I would be remiss if I forgot my copyeditor, Sue Carter, for her unrivaled editing prowess.

Now, I want to extend my profound appreciation to my parents, Faustina and Nicholas Otu. You have been patiently waiting for me to finish my book. You have invested in my intellectual becoming. And here’s hoping that those years of emotive, parental, cultural, and social investments have not gone to waste. I love you forever. Mum and Dad, your daily calls brought me loads of joy. I also want to thank my co-conspirators, the dear friends who have been there for me just when I needed them. Thank you Delali Kumavie, James Perla, Kofi Takyi Asante, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Andrew Small, James Parker, Evan Todtz, and Tristan Stapleton for being such graceful cheerleaders. You're the eyes and minds I needed. You all fed me when I was intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally malnourished. I look forward to a deepened relationship in the future. And, my unquantifiable appreciation goes out to Ryan White and Katie Kelly, for being there for me always.

As the adage goes, it takes a village. You are my village, my community. It would be rather arrogant on my part to disagree with such a witty and deep logic. The conception of this book, its maturation in the womb of my mind, and the labor that accompanied delivering it, the birth pangs, if you will, were softened by the hues afforded by this community. Thus, from the moment I conceived this idea to the point of its delivery, I have been surrounded by countless wonderful souls, a rich community of intellectuals, activists, friends, and individuals from varied xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS backgrounds, and of multiplex orientations, whose urgings and support have allowed this work to acquire a modicum of life. This book, like its content, is quite amphibious. While it is the effort of a community, it has been allowed to have latitude for self-assertion. Thank you all very much.

We have always been here, Auntie Kwame. Which is why these days when they say we are gay, or homo-what-sexual, I am like whatever happened to what we were, to being Kwadwo Besia, Ntowbea? What matters for us is that we have always been here. It is funny because immediately [after?] we became “gay” and “homosexual,” the homophobia began. These labels, which were supposed to describe us as a whole were understood here in Ghana as having to do with sex, sex, sex. That is my opinion!

The place of theory in gender work refers first to theory as it is currently produced and/or used and second to the place theory ought to occupy in work on gender. In relation to the first, the notion that theory is “abstract” or “uninteresting” appears to be shared not only by participants at training sessions but also by many NGO activists in the survey who do not see its significance in their everyday lives or work. As “practical” persons seeking to deal with life-threatening problems of gender-based violence or other deprivations of rights, many activists find theory “remote” or not readily usable in their situations.

—TAKYIWAA MANUH, “DOING GENDER WORK IN GHANA” (2007, 139)

Following a four-year spell in the United States pursuing a graduate degree in Upstate New York, I returned to Ghana in June 2011 to conduct an anthropological project on the tabooed subject of homosexuality. After disembarking from the plane at Ghana’s Kotoka International Airport, the international gateway for air travel, I strutted quickly across the tarmac to escape the beastly heat rising from the asphalt. Like other travelers, I was greeted in the arrival hall by a poster hanging in a silver frame on the wall behind the immigration booths where arriving passengers underwent entry formalities. The sign reads:

Welcome!! Akwaaba!! Ghana warmly welcomes all visitors of goodwill. Ghana does

not welcome paedophiles and other sexual deviants [in red font]. Indeed Ghana

imposes extremely harsh penalties on such sexually aberrant behavior. If you are in 1

FIGURE 1. I first encountered this image at the Kotoka International Airport in Ghana in 2012, which was when I took this photograph. The image hung on a wall at the section of the airport where arrivals underwent immigration formalities.

Ghana for such activity, then for everybody's good, including your own, we suggest you go elsewhere.

This poster, produced by the Ghana Tourism Authority and presented as an innocuous introduction to the country, not only provides an example of the kinds of language, signs, and gateways that gender nonconforming men, who are the subjects of this ethnographic study, must navigate in Ghana, but also exposes how gender expression is increasingly becoming the “sign” used to prop up presumptions about sexuality. Here, male effeminacy is presumed to correlate with homosexuality, a common observation shared by my interlocutors during fieldwork.’ Known in local parlance as “sasso” (singular and plural), this community of self-identified effeminate men is part of a constellation of mostly gender nonconforming subjects whose existence in Ghana challenges the signage, which belies their complex lives and experiences. To be clear, in this ethnography, I shine light on how their self-fashioning strategies are not reducible to their effeminacy or the presumption that they engage in homosexuality. Sasso, as a label, then, transcends conventional definitions of gender (and, I would add, sexuality), which, according to the Ghanaian feminist and scholar Takyiwaa Manuh (2007), has a different purchase in Ghana.’ Mostly residing in the historic coastal suburb of Jamestown, in the capital city of Accra, they engage in the very “sexually aberrant behavior” the poster condemns.’ At the same time that they are compelled to navigate within a nation-state that polices their practices, these sasso must also navigate their way through the nettlesome agendas of human rights organizations. These agendas often elide the fact that domains like Jamestown have always been vibrant sites for sasso connections. This historic suburb, while a multiethnic enclave, is mostly Ga.‘ Hence, the majority of the sasso with whom I interacted spoke the Ga language fluently or partially. Animated by edifices of slavery and colonialism like the James and Usher Forts, which dot the shoreline of Accra, Jamestown is where the Chale Wote Street Festival, a carnival that celebrates Ghanaian and diasporic cultures, is held. Occurring in the middle of August every year, the celebration is a site of unconventional and nonnormative gendered plays and performances, reminiscent of the anthropologist Lyndon Gill’s (2018) characterization of the carnival in Trinidad and Tobago as a fertile site of queer possibilities.

The poster is instructive for this project. It impresses upon visitors to Ghana, as well as to Ghanaians reentering the country, that Ghana screens for “sexual deviants,” into which category it slots “homosexuals” In a postcolonial nation that retained a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality, the sign does not directly announce the criminalization of homosexuality, but nevertheless encodes its illegality.° In other words, the welcoming signage conveys the idea that Ghana is a heterosexual nation. Attempting to distinguish between prescribed and proscribed sexual behaviors, the language on the poster conflates unspecified “deviant” sexual practices with pedophilia and other acts of sexual deviancy, but the lack of specificity is telling.

On the one hand, the poster’s inscription does not explicitly categorize homosexuality as a deviant sexual practice. On the other hand, its “welcoming” sentiment issues an implicit warning to nonheterosexual individuals whose sexual proclivities do not fall within the boundaries and expectations of the state and the image it seeks to project to the world. While it is noticeable that the poster is silent on gender, the inscription “sexual deviance” arguably indexes “gender deviance.” Inevitably, sex and gender are conflated in the warning, implying conformity with the heteronormative gender regime enforced by the heteronational state.’

The intentions and effects of the poster are unmistakable, perhaps most especially for a self-identified queer man such as myself. When I first encountered the poster on the morning of my arrival in June 2011, my response was visceral and its effects would be long-lasting. As I continued the course of my fieldwork in the months ahead, I became guarded about my nonheteronormative sexual leanings. Further, I came to understand how this poster echoed the regulating functions of the state. Ghana takes pride in being “the gateway to Africa,’ a marketing slogan touted by the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Creative Arts and the Ghana Tourism Authority, but this poster contradicts the widely held view that Ghanaians are a very hospitable people. Arguably, such hospitality stops at the boundaries enforced by heterosexuality, implicitly underwriting the familiar representation of Africa as “the closeted continent:*

Between 2011 and 2012, I conducted intermittent ethnographic visits to Ghana, usually during summer break. These short-term visits were followed by long-term fieldwork in 2013 and 2014. Most of the sasso I interacted with resided in, or congregated with other sasso in, Jamestown. Their presence in a country that claims to be primarily heterosexual reveals just how fraught the boundaries and inconsistent the country’s definitions of sexual citizenship are. The complex lives of sasso expose how the coordinates of queer self-making remain contested, questioning the homogenization of sexual identity and the heterosexualization of sexual citizenship. In this respect, my ethnographic exercise is freeing, not just for the bodies and voices that animate this book, but also for me as a queer Ghanaian man. These bodies challenge those fictions and fantasies of heterosexual Ghana while magnifying the contradictions integral to LGBT+ human rights interventions in Africa.

I employed participant observation and life histories, and conducted archival research at the Missionary Collections at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. There, I undertook literary and documentary analyses while pursuing fieldwork at a local NGO, which for the purposes of this ethnography I will call Bring Us Rights and Justice (BURJ).’ The methodologies employed in pursuit of this research allowed me to unpack just how LGBT+ human rights organizations and the nation-state were, paradoxically, mirror images of each other. Each produced inflexible identitarian ontologies for sexual minorities such as sasso. Indeed, the imposition of the seemingly liberating gay identity on sasso, I argue, actually saddled them with an obligatory “gayness” that was, in effect, not too different from the Ghanaian government's enforcement of obligatory heterosexuality. In spite of the imperial/neocolonial homonormativity undergirding LGBT+ human rights interventions, sasso strategically draw on the LGBT+ lexicon and its attendant iconography to embed themselves in the transnational universe of LGBT+ human rights activism in a paradoxical manner."

Thus, while it is readily understood that the “criminalization” of homosexuality by the state makes sexual minorities vulnerable, it is perhaps less understood how LGBT+ human rights organizations, in attempting to address such vulnerability, ultimately exacerbate it." They do so by imposing their own equally inflexible language, signage, and sexual ontologies onto sasso. I focus, in particular, on how neoliberal LGBT+ human rights organizations such as Aidspan, the Global Fund, and BURJ ignore the sociohistorical and political economic complexities that continue to appear, disappear, and reappear in sasso lives. In sum, I discuss how the Ghanaian nation-state and its civil society as well as LGBT+ human rights organizations are complicit in the production and enforcement of labels that neglect the self-making practices of sasso. What I describe in this book as amphibious is intended to capture how sasso navigate the “obligatory gayness” established by LGBT+ human rights organizations and the “obligatory heterosexuality” enforced by the heterosexual nation-state.

ENCOUNTERING AMPHIBIOUS PERSONHOOD

The concept of “amphibious personhood,” first used by the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye, is relevant to sasso self-fashioning. A Harvard-trained philosopher who also studied at the University of Ghana, Kwame Gyekye is one of the formative figures in African philosophy as well as a specialist in Greco-Arabic philosophy, bringing his complex philosophical backgrounds to bear on his elucidation of personhood among the Akan, the largest ethnic group in Ghana.

My turn to Gyekye’s amphibious personhood does not merely represent my attempt to extend into queer space a discussion of indigenous modes of personhood-making that have queer vitality, but takes up Audre Lorde’s call: “As we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes” (1984, 37).

Invested in a process of self-discovery that disavows the structures of feeling Europeans hold most dear, Lorde invites us to break away from those configurations when she evocatively speaks of the liberatory nature of poetry for Black women. Thus: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free” (1984, 38). African philosophical concepts like amphibious personhood as applied to sasso lives affirm such freedom.

Etymologically, amphibian derives from the Greek words amphi and bios, the former meaning “both” and the latter meaning “life.” In the late seventeenth century, the Latin word amphibium described a creature “having two modes of existence” or “possessing a doubtful nature?” The Oxford English Dictionary defines the amphibian as a “cold-blooded vertebrate animal of a class that comprises the frogs, toads, newts, and salamanders. They are distinguished by having an aquatic gill-breathing larval stage followed (typically) by a terrestrial lung-breathing adult stage.” A further definition defines amphibians as “technological machines [such] as a seaplane, tank, or other vehicle that can operate on land and on water.” These technologies are also labeled amphibian especially as they move between multiple spaces, conditions, and temperatures.

Gyekye does not directly reprise these definitions in his discussion on the constitution of a person. Instead, his elucidation of amphibious identification shares some similarity with the general definitions of the amphibian, most of which describe an entity, be it human or animal, animate or inanimate, that moves between two terrains. Embracing the amphibian as a useful heuristic, one which aligns with the processes of self-making expressed in the lives of sasso, I interrogate the homogenization of gender and sexuality by institutions that continue to assume that Western experiential frames are universal. To be clear, I emphasize that sasso life stories jettison the homogenization of Ghanaian citizens as heterogendered and heterosexual as well as the absorption of sasso into what Joseph Massad describes as the “gay international” (2007).

In understanding sasso as subjects who live “amphibiously,’ I capture how their complex lives undermine the homogenizing tendencies integral to the heterosexual investments pursued by the nation-state and the anti-homophobic projects undertaken by LGBT+ human rights organizations. As the sasso and LGBT+ human rights advocate KK hints in their remark in the first epigraph, sasso existed in Ghana before the arrival of LGBT+ human rights political interventions. Implied in that observation is how LGBT+ human rights organizations’ attempts to make visible the victimized “queer” subject violently hypervisibilizes them,” as the recent rise in organizations that spew homophobic vitriol in Ghana indicates. Furthermore, KK’s endearing reference to me as “auntie” provides a glimpse into the glossary of kinship terms utilized by sasso in their daily conversations in the realm of the mundane.

This book is a queer ethnography not least because it weaves interventions from fields in conversation with each other, that is, African philosophy, anthropological studies on sex and gender, and African and Afro-diasporic/Black feminist and queer ruminations on gender, sexuality, and race. That it attends to the tensions and overlaps yielding from these conversations provides me with the framework to argue that sasso inhabit a distinct queer subjectivity. I describe this subjectivity as at once African and non-African, colonial and anticolonial, nameable and unnamable, heterosexual and nonheterosexual, visible and invisible, known and unknown, Western and non-Western, among other crucial distinctions.

Against this backdrop, I dwell within the geography of this book on the theoretical challenges that sasso lives present to hegemonic queer theory in the West, normative African philosophy, and Eurocentric anthropological approaches to gender and sexuality. Embracing the call by the Ghanaian feminist Takyiwaa Manuh, outlined in the second epigraph, that we engage with the challenges of the place of theory in gender work in Ghana, I ask: how can we make theory useful in understanding the lifeworlds of sasso without diminishing the painful, contradictory realities they navigate daily? Having engaged with sasso, some of whom are activists, and NGO workers, some of whom engage in LGBT+ human rights activism, in this book, I straddle that thin line between theory and practice by interrogating the nation-state and LGBT+ human rights NGOs’ investment in the dichotomy between heterosexual and homosexual as well as gender and sexuality.

I diagram how sasso engage in gender and sexual practices that render messy existing conventions of gender and sexuality. In other words, I examine how sasso embody a gender and sexual subjectivity that circumvents homophobia while navigating the meanings of gender and sexuality circulating under LGBT+ humanitarianism. Thus, this ethnography is comparable to the Dutch-Surinamese anthropologist Gloria Wekker’s ethnography on women’s sexual practices and relationships in postcolonial Suriname, described as “mati work.” Like Wekker, I “insist upon alternatively using ‘indigenous’ terminology” (2006, 68), embracing sasso as a vernacular category that troubles the reduction of sexuality and desire to identity and activity.

Moreover, I demonstrate that sasso is not merely an indigenous label since it hosts a constellation of practices, relationships, and ideas that are at once local, global, and transnational. In fact, it is a site of competing meanings. And, by relying on accounts shared by sasso themselves, I challenge how Western sexual and gender conventions get reproduced as universal even in radical liberatory sexual and gender politics. In doing so, I elaborate on how the entangling nature of sasso lives and experiences confound the homogenizing impulses of both the Ghanaian state and the LGBT+ human rights organizations who would put the country on a corrective course.

DISROBING FICTIONS OF HETEROSEXUAL GHANA

Let us for a moment return to KK, who resists such impulses by refuting the homogenized representation of Ghana as a heterosexual nation, as well as the claim that nonheterosexual subjects are “foreign” to Ghana. Instead, he foregrounds how effeminate men, who are known among the Akan of Ghana as “Kwadwo Besia’ or “Ntowbea,’ both “man-woman” in English, have been integral to Ghana's sexual and gender landscapes." Claiming that “they have always been there; KK poses the question: in what ways do LGBT+ human rights activities in Ghana displace and replace that “they” with LGBT+ nomenclature? His frustration also suggests how the increased visibility of LGBT+ human rights politics has led to the pathologization of Kwadwo Besia and Ntowbea, terms that are now associated with “homosexuality”

I echo, in part, the work of the Swiss-Ghanaian anthropologist Serena Dankwa to answer that question. In Knowing Women (2021), her ethnography on female same-sex intimacies, Dankwa dispels the fiction that Ghana is a primarily heterosexual nation. Exploring same-sex intimacies among women, indigenously known as “supi” relationships, Dankwa outlines a constellation of intimate practices to demonstrate the complexity of Ghana’s erotic cultures. “Friendship marriages” observed among the Nzema people of southwestern Ghana by the Italian ethnologist Italo Signorini, for example, form an intricate part of this complex constellation. Known as “agonwole agyale,”'’® which translates into English as “friendship marriage,” this marriage “is considered on the conscious level as the noblest expression of friendship: the sublimation of a deep feeling which is of considerable value as a factor of social cohesion in Nzema culture and which is recognized by that society and expressed through institutions of growing complexity according to the intensity of the sentiments involved” (1973, 222). Thus, the presence of Kwadwo Besia and Ntowbea, supi relationships, and agonwole agyale among the Nzema exemplifies the wide range of intimacies, identities, and practices in Ghana.

Even as the government considers same-sex intimacies as “foreign” to Ghana, a position underscored by the closure of an LGBT+ office run by the organization LGBT+ Rights Ghana on February 23, 2021, LGBT+ human rights groups have become increasingly visible in the country.” On the one hand, their presence serves to establish that LGBT+ citizens of Ghana have “rights” that need defending; on the other hand, these human rights groups come with their own homogenizing tendencies and agendas that seek to assimilate sasso in Ghana to the labels—lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, and queer+—that reduce sasso subjectivity to their sexual orientation. In this book, I refer to these incidents as “heterocolonial” tropes wrapped in “homocolonial” tones precisely because they rehearse colonial and Christian projects that displaced arguably fluid precolonial gender formations. Assimilationist labels such as LGBT+ work to suck sasso into the vortex Dennis Altman (1997) frames as “global gay? The men in my study prefer the term sasso largely because, in their view, it does not carry the weight and currency that LGBT+ terms are presumed to carry. Furthermore, sasso not only avoids the negative baggage associated with LGBT+ in Ghana, but also makes navigating the homophobia spewed by Christian organizations less challenging.

Christianity and Constitutionality: Handmaidens of Heteronationalism

Ghana is undoubtedly a nation where Christian precepts are fundamental to the policing of both gender and sexuality. The pronouncement made by former president John Evans Atta Mills in 2011 at the National Convention of the Church of Pentecost is unambiguous: “Christ is the President of Ghana’! This statement, which epitomizes Christianity’s synecdochic and irreducible prominence, boldly reinforces the perception that Ghana is a heterosexual Christian nation. The National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values (NCPH- SRFV), an anti-LGBT+ NGO that wages campaigns against the “growing menace of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT+) Rights activities in the world,’ also perpetuates the idea of a heterosexual Ghana.

Established in 2013, the coalition’s membership, which includes religious and civil society organizations such as the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), Ghana's oldest and leading Christian organization, has taken the stance that homosexuality is the result of Westernization. Thus, the organization has been unrelenting in its opposition not only to the liberalization of LGBT+ human rights but also to efforts to incorporate comprehensive sexuality education interventions into Ghanas educational policy. Receiving funding from Western evangelical organizations like Family Watch International, the coalition is intent on preserving heterosexual family values that it believes are being “eroded” by LGBT+ human rights organizations.

Christianity’s overwhelming presence is just one part of the story. Ghana's Fourth Republican Constitution reinforces Christian teachings by criminalizing what it describes as “unnatural carnal knowledge.’ The logical corollary of British colonial legal schemes, the constitution’s proscriptions and prescriptions on unnatural carnal knowledge remain vague (Atuguba 2019). In an interview conducted by the Human Rights Watch, an assistant commissioner of police in Ghana revealed that “the term unnatural carnal knowledge is vague, does not have any clear meaning in law, creates difficulties in consistent interpretation and its application is used to target LGBT+ people” (Human Rights Watch 2017). The